cross-cultural

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while (or literature on this topic) you know the answer is no. I’ve blogged about this before, but I think it is a topic that needs a lot more coverage because the myths that all anorexia nervosa patients are just afraid of being fat, that they lose weight just to be thin, and that thin models are to blame for AN are still very common.

As you’ll see, I am not claiming that this isn’t true for some patients. Instead, what I am claiming is that it is not true for all patients.

And a big personal goal of mine with this blog is to broad the conversation about eating disorders. Let’s get away from stereotypes and painting all anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa patients in the same light. Let’s instead have meaningful discussions about research on eating disorders, about … Continue reading →

What is the impact of Western culture on eating disorders? Do images of thin cause eating disorders? I mean, it seems like such a nice and simple hypothesis. It makes intuitive sense: glamorize thin and make thin cool and BAM, everyone wants to be thin. It would be so much easier. Cause? Found. Solution? Easy: ban thin models. Unfortunately (or fortunately for me, since it gives me a lot to blog about) the answer is not that simple.

Just in the last couple of hours, some people who’ve ended up on the SEDs blog have searched:

A really fun aspect of blogging is seeing what search terms lead people to my blog; a frustrating side-effect is not being able to interact with those people directly. This entry is, in part, an attempt to answer a common question that leads individuals to my blog. Common question or search queries are variants of the following (these are actual search terms that led to this blog, I corrected spelling mistakes): “do models cause eating disorders in women?”, “pictures of skinny models linked to eating disorders”, “do the images of models in magazines cause eating disorders?”, “eating disorders relating to thin models”, “psychiatrists thought on how skinny models are causing eating disorders”, “thin models are to blame for eating disorder.”

Well, you get the point.

I briefly started tackling the notions that the “thin ideal” promoted by Western media is to blame for the prevalence of eating disorders and a … Continue reading →

Definitioner

a set of interrelated beliefs, values, attitudes, and norms that are used to explain and/or justify change or preservation of the status quo (13)

egosyntonic

referring to aspects of a person's behavior, thoughts, and attitudes that are viewed by the self as acceptable and consistent with the total personality (14)

body image

one’s sense of the self and one’s body (14)

DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)

published by the American Psychiatric Association, offers a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders (11)

DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)

published by the American Psychiatric Association, offers a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders (11)

precision

in statistics: a measure of the likelihood of random errors in the results of a study, meta-analysis or measurement; the greater the precision, the less random error; confidence intervals around the estimate of effect from each study are one way of expressing precision, with a narrower confidence interval meaning more precision (2)

prevalence

the proportion of a population having a particular condition or characteristic (e.g., the percentage of people in a city with a particular disease, or who smoke) (2)

self-awareness

the top level of consciousness; cognizance of the autobiographical character of personally experienced events (4)

internalization

the process through which children absorb knowledge from the social context (4)

correlation

a statistical relationship between two variables such that high scores on one factor tend to go with high scores on the other factor (positive correlation) or that high scores on one factor go with low scores on the other factor (negative correlation) (8)

validity

the truthfulness of a measure; the degree to which a measuring instrument measures what it is supposed to measure (6,8)